This was my first acquaintance
with the music of the American composer
Jeremy Beck. Beck grew up – playing
the cello – in Quincy, Illinois and
later went on to study at the Mannes
College of Music, Duke University and
Yale School of Music. His teachers have
included Lukas Foss, Jacob Druckman,
Stephen Jaffe and David Loeb. He is
presently based in Louisville, Kentucky.

On the evidence of
these three compositions, Beck’s music
is very well crafted, in an idiom which
has much in common with the twentieth
century ‘mainstream’ of American music
– as found in the work of figures such
as Barber or Roy Harris or, in some
respects, Bernstein. His tonal compositions
are largely orthodox, even old-fashioned
in the way they work, in the emphasis
they place on melody, though that isn’t
to deny that Beck makes imaginative
use of the inherited tradition. There
is, interestingly, a common thread one
might describe as ‘literary’ linking
the three works on the present CD.

The Cello Sonata heard
here is apparently Beck’s third venture
in the form; a first sonata was written
as an undergraduate in the 1980s, a
second during his time as a graduate
student at Duke University. The three
movements of this third all have titles
or headings, and what Beck calls "an
ending title". The first movement
is headed Aria da capo and is
accompanied by the words "sings
upon waking"; the second is headed
Pavane and has as its ending
text the phrase "receives a Princess";
the final movement is headed Galliard
and has the words "observes the
precious foibles of the Earth"
as its "ending title". Beck
explains his purpose in using such texts:
"the headings are classical references,
suggesting historical derivations and
structural nuances; the endings are
poetic, all of which are connected to
the primary image of the sonata. The
poetry is meant to open emotional windows
into the interior of the piece, rather
than suggest specific visual cues".
A slightly cool melancholy pervades
all three movements, more evocative
of the moon’s effect on an earthly,
sparsely peopled landscape than of the
moonscape itself. This is a human piece,
rather than an astronomical one, as
it were. Aria da Capo begins
with some attractively singing music
for the cello and, in what follows there
are passages of lively interplay between
the two instruments. Expectations that
we will return to the original da
capo aria are not, however, fulfilled.
Analogously the second movement – Pavane
– again seems to imply a ternary structure
which isn’t completed; the rapid section
of this movement is particularly exhilarating.
In Galliard Beck plays a witty
hand, formally speaking. The ‘missing’
third section of the second movement
is unexpectedly introduced and is followed,
in turn, by the ‘absent’ repeat of the
aria from the first movement. This neat
way of belatedly keeping the formal
‘promises’ made earlier is a nice example
of how traditions can be (and always
are) made new by gifted composers.

Songs Without Words
is again in three movements, each of
which is designed as a response to a
specific poem and each of which gets
its title from that poem. The first,
‘Irresistible Death’ is inspired by
a passage from Pablo Neruda’s ‘Alturas
de Macchu Picchu’; the second, ‘…mists
of brightness’ gets its title from one
of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnets,
and the last, ‘Night Watch’ offers a
kind of musical articulation of a short
poem by Vikram Seth (whose An Equal
Music of 1999 is, incidentally,
surely one of the finest of modern ‘music’
novels, in its study of relationships
between - and beyond - the members of
a string quartet). Though the music
is pleasant, and though both Elizabeth
Sadilek and Gretchen Brumwell play with
winning tenderness, I found this less
gripping than the Cello Sonata. I wasn’t
always able to hear quite how the music
related to the poem, and wasn’t always
sure that the music had quite enough
substance to stand entirely on its own.

The longest work here
– and rather different in character
from the two which precede it on the
disc – is Black Water. This originated,
Beck tells us, in a reading of Joyce
Carol Oates’s novel of the same name.
The novel is a fictionalised account
of the events of what happened on Chappaquidick
Island in July 1969, the accident in
which Mary Jo Kopechne drowned when
Senator Ted Kennedy’s car left the road.
It is presented from the point of view
of the drowning woman – called Kelly
Kelleher in Oates’s version – as she
reacts to the reality of her situation
and also experiences both hallucinations
and sudden rushes of memory. In part,
the novel is a study in how and why
powerful men can have a destructive
attractiveness for certain women. Beck
has produced his own libretto – printed
here in full - from the text of Oates’s
novel. It makes an extended monody for
soprano and here gets a powerful performance
from Jean McDonald and Robin Guy. There
is a considerable range of moods, many
rapid switches of pace and idiom, a
sustained intensity – all communicated
in a performance which has both force
and subtlety. If I say that I would
like to hear other performers tackle
this work I don’t mean in any way to
denigrate McDonald and Guy; I say it
because I think this is a work which
would reward other performers too and
which would lend itself to a variety
of interpretations.

Black Water
is a compelling work; the interestingly
inventive Cello Sonata gets an excellent
performance from Emilio Colón
and Heather Coltman; the Songs Without
Words are, at the least, pleasant, even
if I find them less attention-grabbing
than the other two works. In short,
this is a fine sampler of a composer
whose work I shall certainly look out
for in future.

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